Speech’s timing lets Kasich sell big ideas

JULIE CARR SMYTH

AP State­house Correspondent

COLUMBUS — By tim­ing the address to fol­low his major bud­get, tax reform and school fund­ing pro­pos­als, Ohio Gov. John Kasich’s annual State of the State speech Tues­day in Lima will feel more like a stump speech for 2014 than the typ­i­cal litany of big pol­icy initiatives.

The Repub­li­can gov­er­nor will use the speech to pro­mote his lat­est ideas for the state, rather than announce them.

He’s said as much.

“For those that are think­ing that they want to come to Lima on the 19th for a whole bunch of new things in the State of the State, don’t come,” he said in unveil­ing his $63.2 bil­lion, two-year bud­get this month. “Because I think we’ve got it all out on the field right now.”

For the sec­ond con­sec­u­tive year, Kasich is tak­ing the address out­side Colum­bus, and out­side the State­house, where pro-labor pro­test­ers packed the halls and sent up dis­rup­tive shouts dur­ing his first address in 2011.

Last year, Kasich made his­tory when he first gave the speech else­where, pick­ing the Demo­c­ra­tic and union strong­hold of Steubenville to high­light pos­i­tives he said were tak­ing place in eco­nom­i­cally hard-hit east­ern Ohio, par­tic­u­larly sur­round­ing K-12 edu­ca­tion and oil and gas exploration.

With Lima, in north­west Ohio, Kasich has found a man­u­fac­tur­ing hub with sig­nif­i­cantly improved employ­ment, which also sits in the heart of reli­ably Repub­li­can farm coun­try. The new leader of the Ohio Sen­ate that’s some­times block Kasich’s plans, Pres­i­dent Keith Faber of Celina, lives nearby.

Located about 80 miles south of Toledo, Lima was built around fac­to­ries that made loco­mo­tives and school buses. Heavy indus­try still dri­ves the city, home to an oil refin­ery, a Ford Motor Co. engine plant and the nation’s only tank man­u­fac­tur­ing plant.

Like many of Ohio’s indus­trial cities, poverty is a prob­lem in some neigh­bor­hoods, but the city’s unem­ploy­ment has been nearly cut in half from two years ago and now stands at 7 percent.

Pres­i­dent Barack Obama’s cam­paign rally just days before the elec­tion last Novem­ber marked the first time a sit­ting Demo­c­ra­tic pres­i­dent vis­ited Lima since Harry Tru­man stopped there in 1948. In the end, Obama’s rival, Repub­li­can Mitt Rom­ney, hand­ily won Allen County last year, scor­ing 61 per­cent of the vote to Obama’s 37 percent.

By revers­ing the usual speech-then-budget pat­tern of past gov­er­nors, the for­mer con­gress­man is fol­low­ing a clas­sic cam­paign for­mat: Announce a big pol­icy ini­tia­tive, then hit the road to sell its merits.

“He’s try­ing to seize the ini­tia­tive a lit­tle bit, kind of take a proac­tive approach,” said Grant Nee­ley, a polit­i­cal sci­en­tist at the Uni­ver­sity of Day­ton. “It’s the sec­ond time he’s tak­ing the State of the State address out­side the cap­i­tal, so he feels like it’s a more recep­tive audi­ence. He’s try­ing to paint him­self as a proac­tive gov­er­nor com­ing for­ward with all those pro­pos­als kind of rapid-fire.”

To review:

• In mid-December, Kasich announced his plan to bor­row against future toll rev­enue on the Ohio Turn­pike to gen­er­ate up to $3 bil­lion for high­way and bridge con­struc­tion projects

• On Jan. 9, the pri­vate non­profit job-creation entity Kasich cre­ated, Job­sO­hio, announced with the admin­is­tra­tion that it was mov­ing for­ward with the sale of $1.5 bil­lion in bonds backed by future state liquor pro­ceeds — dis­re­gard­ing a pend­ing law­suit against the entity’s constitutionality.

• On Jan. 31, the admin­is­tra­tion released its much-anticipated over­haul of Ohio’s school fund­ing for­mula. Kasich said the aim was help­ing stu­dents in poor dis­tricts com­pete by nar­row­ing tax-base dis­par­i­ties, while reward­ing inno­va­tion and expand­ing access to vouch­ers. The plan gave an over­all boost to the K-12 bot­tom line, propos­ing $15.1 bil­lion in spend­ing over two years, but left the bulk of indi­vid­ual dis­tricts with lit­tle to no increase in the first year.

• Four days later, Kasich unveiled a bud­get packed with sig­nif­i­cant pol­icy over­hauls. They included a restruc­tur­ing of Ohio’s tax code to phase in reduc­tions to income and small-business taxes and apply­ing the state sales tax, at a slightly lower rate, to long list of addi­tional ser­vices. The bud­get also incor­po­rates an expan­sion of Med­ic­aid through the fed­eral health care over­haul, the new K-12 school-funding for­mula, and a new way of fund­ing pub­lic col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties that fos­ters cost-saving col­lab­o­ra­tion and empha­sizes col­lege com­ple­tion over enrollment.

Mark Cas­sell, an asso­ciate polit­i­cal sci­ence pro­fes­sor at Kent State Uni­ver­sity, said Kasich’s bud­get and school fund­ing pack­age is “very mixed” for Ohioans. By lay­ing out the plan ahead of the State of the State, the gov­er­nor has given him­self a forum to defend it.

“There’s a bit of smoke and mir­rors in there,” Cas­sell said. “In the last bud­get, he pushed along these dra­con­ian cuts to the local level. He can now pro­claim to be very gen­er­ous to those local gov­ern­ments and schools, while offer­ing these tax cuts. But broad­en­ing the sales tax will mean ris­ing costs for every­one, and the poor will be hit the hardest.”

Cas­sell said, “I think he gen­uinely believes these things are going to work to improve the state’s econ­omy.” The State of the State will be his chance to sell them.

Posted by AP News on Feb 17 2013. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.